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Why didn't he save this for Lucky Peach? David Chang documented a recent Hong Kong trip with blurry camera phone photos for Vanity Fair. Highlights include perhaps a front-of-house hustler at a beef brisket noodle joint that Chang calls "the greatest restaurant player I’ve ever seen," and a headlong dive into the food court bonzana at the Wong Nai Chung Cooked Food Centre. There's also the eerie omnipresence of Mario Batali, whose name appears on elevator plaques directing visitors to Lupa's Hong Kong outpost that opened in the spring. But as Chang tweaks his own ever-expanding empire with visits to street food meccas in far-flung places, the momofire burns ever strong Stateside, too.

Má Pêche and the New York Public Library have collaborated on a new sort of power lunch, an arts and culture salon called the 56th Street Round Table, which debuts this Friday. Each program has two parts: a talk upstairs at noon, followed by a $45 lunch and continued conversation down in the Má Pêche dining room. This promises to be a lot like the legendary, old-school Algonquin Round Table, except it goes down in the mezzanine instead of an actual round table. Fair enough. Everything starts this Friday with a talk on the renaissance of zines in the digital age, featuring three speakers, including genius Thessaly La Force of Girl Crush.